Informal Probability Seminars

Michaelmas Term 2004

Centre for Mathematical Sciences
Wilberforce Road, Cambridge, CB3 0WB
Tel: (01223) 337958
Fax: (01223) 337956
Email: secretary@statslab.cam.ac.uk

Seminars will be held in Meeting Room 12

All interested are welcome


Seminar Schedule:

This list is subject to revision

Select a date to view the relevant seminar abstracts:

Tuesday 12 October
2.00pm John Kingman (Isaac Newton Institute)
The Poisson-Dirichlet distribution in number theory
Tuesday 19 October
2.00pm Peter Friz (University of Cambridge)
Rough Path Theory and Applications to Stochastic Analysis
Tuesday 26 October
2.00pm James Martin (Paris)
Heavy tails in last-passage percolation
Tuesday 2 November
2.00pm Andrew Stuart (Warwick)
Homogenization results for inertial particles
Tuesday 9 November
2.00pm Christina Goldschmidt (University of Cambridge)
Dual coagulation and fragmentation and the genealogy of Yule processes
Tuesday 16 November
2.00pm Helyette Geman (University Paris Dauphine and ESSEC Business School)
Different Approaches to the Volatility Smile: from Lévy processes to local Levy
Tuesday 23 November
2.00pm Boris Tsirelson
Continuous products and their automorphisms
Tuesday 23 November
3.30pm Dr N Vvedenskaya (Institute of Problems of Information Transmission, Moscow)
Continuous products and their automorphisms
Tuesday 30 November
2.00pm Philippe Balland
Diffusion of Short-dated Smile

Abstracts and Further Details:

Tuesday 12 October

2.00pm John Kingman (Isaac Newton Institute)

The Poisson-Dirichlet distribution in number theory

Tuesday 19 October

2.00pm Peter Friz

Rough Path Theory and Applications to Stochastic Analysis

We review Terry Lyons' theory of "rough paths" and discuss its applications to Brownian motion. The Stroock-Varadhan support theorem is obtained as corollary.

Tuesday 26 October

2.00pm James Martin (Paris)

Heavy tails in last-passage percolation

Tuesday 2 November

2.00pm Andrew Stuart (Warwick)

Homogenization results for inertial particles

Tuesday 9 November

2.00pm Christina Goldschmidt (University of Cambridge)

Dual coagulation and fragmentation and the genealogy of Yule processes

We describe a nice example of duality between coagulation and fragmentation associated with certain Dirichlet distributions. The fragmentation and coalescence chains we derive arise naturally in the context of the genealogy of Yule processes.

Tuesday 16 November

2.00pm Helyette Geman (University Paris Dauphine and ESSEC Business School)

Different Approaches to the Volatility Smile: from Levy processes to local Lévy

The goal of the talk is to review the various ways of addressing the volatility smile issue, from "local volatility" and stochastic volatility models to jump processes. A particular attention will be dedicated to pure jump Lévy processes, with the possible addition of stochastic volatility: calibration of the volatility surface will be discussed in this setting. Lastly, some mathematical elements on "local Lévy" models will be presented.

Tuesday 23 November

2.00pm Boris Tsirelson

Continuous products and their automorphisms

Tuesday 23 November

3.30pm Dr N Vvedenskaya (Institute of Problems of Information Transmission, Moscow)

Load balancing systems and large deviations

Consider a queueing system of two servers and three arrival flows. Flows 1 and 2, of loads $\rho_1$ and $\rho_2$, are dedicated and always go in the buffers of servers 1 and 2, respectively. Tasks from flow 0 join the queue which has the smaller workload at the time of arrival. The subcriticality condition is that $\rho_i<1$, > $i=1,2$, and $\rho_0+\rho_1+\rho_2<2$. The talk studies Large deviations in the stationary regime for the virtual waiting time in the opportunistic flow $\rho_0$.

When the arrival flows are M/GI, with non-heavy service-distribution tails, the system can be analysed in a straighforward fashion: the answer depends on a balance condition $\rho_0>|\rho_1-\rho_2|$. However, it is interesting (and challenging) to discuss a general case of flows with heavy tails and/or dependencies. The talk will focus on an ongoing work (by K. Duffy, D. Malone, E. Pechersky, Y. Suhov and N. Vvedenskaya) where Large deviation predictions are numerically checked for a variety of arrival flows.

Tuesday 30 November

2.00pm Philippe Balland

Diffusion of Short-dated Smile

In this talk, we analyse implied volatility models defined by assuming that the per-delta short-dated smile is stochastic. We derive the differential equation satisfied by the short-dated smile that ensures no-arbitrage. We solve this equation in particular cases and we obtain analytical expressions for the corresponding short-dated smile that generalises the formulae derived by P. Hagan when the volatility is lognormal and correlated with spot.

Seminar organizer, Chris Rogers.
Please see also the Statistical Laboratory Seminars.

Last updated 06-Oct-2004
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